February 2007
Feb. 22, 2007
OpenStreetMap Baghdad. OSM has mapped the streets by tracing from aerial imagery, but needs help with the names of the streets.
Wired News: Web Startups Reboot ’London 2.0’. Crikey... the toungue-in-cheek name for our Rails/Django meetups has inspired a Wired article!
Browser Wars. Doug Crockford is hosting a panel discussion with Chris Wilson from IE, Mike Shaver from Mozilla and Håkon Wium Lie from Opera on February 28th in Sunnyvale.
A Gathering Of Geeks. The Oxford Mail’s coverage of Nat’s Oxford Geek Night event.
Introducing Windows CardSpace. I incorrectly stated in my talk yesterday that CardSpace was a feature of Vista; it’s actually available for XP as well as part of the .NET 3.0 framework.
prooveme.com. An OpenID provider that uses SSL client certificates (which you install in your browser) for authentication.
John Resig: Thoughts on OpenAjax. I hadn’t looked in to OpenAjax—from John’s analysis it seems like they need to make it easier for open-source projects to participate and do a bunch of work to modernise their core library.
Feb. 23, 2007
Serving YUI Files from Yahoo! Servers (via) If everyone who uses YUI links to the same set of files, your users will already have the YUI code cached in their browser when they arrive on your site.
PyCon Day 1: OLPC Has Excited me. Did you know that the OLPC machines have a “show source” button?
XTech 2007 schedule: behind the scenes. Expectnation looks like a smart piece of software for conference organisers. There’s surprisingly little crossover with Event Wax—it looks like the two could complement each other nicely.
Feb. 25, 2007
Data::ObjectDriver. Benjamin Trott’s Perl ORM, with built in support for both caching and data partitioning. I think this is what Six Apart uses for Vox.
Camino 1.1 Beta. Camino now has session saving. I simply won’t use a browser that doesn’t have this feature.
Oxford Geeks hit the media! Coverage in the local newspaper and on the radio, with MP3s.
Flash MP3 Player. Nice little embeddable MP3 player, with support for single files or Atom/XSPF/RSS playlists.
Facebook Query Language. The Facebook API now lets you run SQL-like queries. You can’t do joins but you can perform very simple subselects.
Warning, this is a bad site!
Unfortunately it’s not a glitch in the matrix—this happened to a friend of mine. If a site gets this warning and isn’t listed on StopBadWare.org it just means that Google have blacklisted it themselves—they don’t share their reasons with StopBadWare, and provide no mechanism to find out why they’ve blacklisted you. The link to StopBadWare is something of a red herring.
[... 135 words]I don't do test driven development. I do stupidity driven testing... I wait until I do something stupid, and then write tests to avoid doing it again.
Six cool things you can build with OpenID
I’ve posted the slides from my Future of Web Apps talk on OpenID, minus the demo videos. I’m planning to put together a video that combines the slides, demos and audio once the official podcasts have been published.
[... 816 words]Feb. 26, 2007
Django snippets. James Bennett’s new site for Django snippets. The source code to the whole site is available.
More on Decentralised Social Networking. Martin Atkins has been thinking hard about the practicalities of building decentralised social networking on top of OpenID.
OpenID makes web identities real and appealing. DHH has caught the OpenID bug. Expect to see a flurry of activity around OpenID in the Rails community over the next few weeks.
Feb. 27, 2007
Oxford Geek Night 2 call for proposals. The next event is coming up in April. Get your talk proposals in now!
The No-Shit Guide To Supporting OpenID In Your Applications. Fantastically useful: Dan Webb digs through the API documentation so you don’t have to. The example code is for Rails but the PHP and Python libraries work in much the same way.
OpenID and microformats support on XTech site. “A single-sign on solution like OpenID solves an important problem for us, as most people tend to interact with our conference web sites in only one or two time periods each year.”
swf Image Replacement. Really neat idea: unobtrusively replace an inline image with a SWF, then apply effects like rotation, rounded corners and drop-shadowns. Shame it suffers from Flash-Of-Unstyled-Content.
Microformats Bookmarklet. Microformats bookmarklet, targetted at Safari. Uses jQuery CSS selectors for parsing, and generates .vcf vCard files using data: uris.
Feb. 28, 2007
A Review of a Book That Should Be Read Much More Widely Than It Will Be. Greg reviews “Why Aren’t More Women in Science?”, a collection of 15 articles that make their arguments based on scientific research.
soupselect. My simple extension to BeautifulSoup that allows you to grab elements using CSS selectors; should be useful for parsing microformats.
Despite it being a best practice, currently only a handful of OpenID Consumer sites support the association of multiple OpenID identifiers to a single "account". This is important to create redundancy to make the loss of an identifier less catastrophic.